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Check out my creative portfolio at robduarte.com

My email breaks about once a year. Something about one of the mail clients I use, the mail server, procmail or whatever, trashes the mail file somehow. I’ve tried editing the file but that often doesn’t work. I think I’ve found another potential solution…

I’ve created a blog that will contain video episodes describing hardware hacks that might be useful to artists and other makers. I seem to use this blog (the one that you’re reading right now) less and less – maybe I’ll start a series of smaller ones to replace this one sometime.

I’m teaching Processing to art students at UCSD and the course’s professor has basically asked them to create visual rhythm. I made a few sketches to show a simple way in which this might be accomplished.

I modified my phpstates code include to display countries and Canadian provinces as well. The country codes come from the UPS developer’s API. This is another one of those snippets that I use often, so maybe it will help you out.

I was looking for a quick and simple PHP function that would validating credit card numbers, but the code I found was mostly clunky and sometimes just wrong. I wrote this function and it seems to work correctly. Feel free to use it and leave a comment here if it works for you.

I like the little gems of ingenuity and economy of design found inside crappy toys. I was taking apart some electronic toys yesterday, as is my wont. This particular toy had a few neat mechanisms, but I thought this use of rotary encoders and cams was especially cool.

I made this keyboard from a $1 toy that I bought at Savers. I made some changes to the electronics including pitch control, a 555 timer circuit that adds extra resistance in secret places, a speed control for the timer, 1/4″ output jack, and a touch-contact for good measure. I fabricated the case from cold-rolled [...]

I wrote this library, called NESpad, for anyone who wants to interface an NES game pad with the Arduino microcontroller. I also made an SNES library (SNESpad), but I haven’t tested it with an actual SNES joystick.

Joysticks 101. Basically, we’ve got two types of joysticks: analog and digital. You’ve probably used both kinds. The buttons work pretty much the same on either kind – you either click it or you don’t – but the actual “stick” part is what makes them different. This post starts out with some basic joystick info [...]

I have a stack of wooden church organ pipes in my studio. I was going to make a mobile, solar- and human-powered organ that is played with theremin-like controls or a tangible interface of some kind. I haven’t gotten around to it, but this sketch kind of sums it up.

A while back, I converted my 1994 Ford E-350 van to run on vegetable oil. I never took really good notes on what I did to convert the van, but I had all kinds of scribble-sketches hanging around all the time. Some of them are here.

I tried to make a time machine using an AVR Tiny13 and a peanut butter jar. Okay, so maybe it’s not really a time machine, but it’s definitely a kind of trippy time-manipulator ala Doc Edgerton’s stroboscope experiments. Either way, it works and it’s pretty cool.

TextMate is pretty incredible. I just started reading the book on it and if I can ever get used to the 8 million key combinations I’m sure it’ll shave minutes off of my year. Really, though, I’m amazed everytime I see a screencast where someone is using TextMate and the code just seems to blast [...]

I have a few bicycles but these are the cooler ones. I bought both the Raleigh Supercourse and the Columbia Cyclone from the Greenhouse in Needham (or maybe it’s Wellesley), Massachusetts. It’s actually a greenhouse – with tons of used bikes and junk. Anyway, I bought the Columbia to turn into a crazy chopper, but [...]

Back when I had my SV, I got a nail in my tire and I documented the process of getting it fixed so I could remember what I did the next time. This info could help you out, but obviously I’m not Suzuki so don’t come looking for me if your wheel falls off.

motd stands for “message of the day” and it’s the message that you see when you login to a unix-like system via ssh, telnet, the console, etc. Some people like to put cute sayings or “welcome” messages, but if I’m setting up a server for someone else, I generally want to put a less friendly [...]

Renegade exhausts are awesome. You should own one. The people who make them are the best. But, actually, this page is for people who already own Renegade exhausts and are wondering what’s involved in replacing its wool packing. I think you’re supposed to change the wool every 4,000 miles if you have a carbon fiber [...]

My general experience with motorcycle shops is that I haven’t really liked any service or sales departments and I’ve only liked a couple parts departments. This post is where we out the stinkers and praise the good guys.

This is how I find out where a remote client is coming from. It takes into account proxies and tries to get the hostname using gethostbyaddr(). Frankly, this was written many years ago so I’m not sure if I’d do it the same way. If nothing else, it should be a good starting point for [...]

I wrote this cross-reference a while back for people who know how to program using Perl and are looking for some of the familiar Perl functions in the php language. When I originally write it, we were stuck with php 3 so I just reworked the list to include some of the functions that were [...]

The only real way that I’ve found to extract data from an MS Access .mdb file on MacOS X is to use mdbtools. If you aren’t familiar with the unix underpinnings of MacOS X, this information might be too much for you. Otherwise, this is a step-by-step list of what I had to do to get mdbtools to compile and get useful data from a .mdb

These are instructions for burning a DVD disc when what you’ve been given is a .img (Disk Image) file. The instructions are for users of MacOS X. If you’re using Windows or Linux, check Google for other pages like this one.

Sort of weird, but a bunch of years ago I was really excited about the variety of tools that I had used in the span of only a few months of working on projects at the Massachusetts College of Art, at Handshouse Studio, and with the Timber Framer’s Guild. I guess I made this page [...]

I wrote this list back in 2001 and I updated it for a year or two. I had a 2000 Suzuki SV650 at the time, so you’ll see a lot of references to that bike. Also, I don’t buy things made from animals and as far as I know, the only products that contain leather [...]